Heart of Darkness and the Strange Hauntings of Liminal Experience
What Marlow Sees through the cover story of Enlightenment Liberalism. We need his vision in order to be fully human, and save us from the gods and monsters trap.
Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness features his great Hythloday-esque traveler narrator Marlow. Like Hythloday from Thomas More’s Utopia, he is an odd bird, even among his fellow sailors. Marlow is odd in almost every way, but his liminal status and counter-script existence affords him insights that are inaccessible to most, and he is an avatar of Conrad himself. Joseph Conrad was an immigrant to England from Poland, and it appears that English was likely his third language, maybe fourth. Though we do see the occasional glitch, he is undoubtedly a magician of English prose: both lyrical and punchy, evocative and moody. He sees through things because he himself was liminal. An inside-outside seer of Empires, a Tiresias of sorts.
The unnamed narrator of Heart of Darkness, a fellow sailor aboard the cruising yawl Nellie wryly notes that “we were in store for another of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences.” Anyone who has read and experienced the novel knows that though it may be “inconclusive” it certainly leaves a distinct feeling of unease. It is impressive, as in, it leaves a deep impression. Indeed, Marlow himself appears exhausted and spent, saying mid-story that it was the most impactful experience of his life. Upon completion he is exhausted and harrowed, re-experiencing what we would dub “the trauma” merely in re-telling it. His story is strange because he is strange.
Several times Marlow is compared to a Buddha, a storyteller and yarn spinner both respected by the normie fellow sailors, but also seen as the odd ball “man of the sea.” The other men aboard the ship know that Marlow is the “real deal” but also unlike any of them in substantial ways. In the now-time of the story, Marlow and the crew are waiting to leave Gravesend, the last stop on the way out of London and out into the open waters for their maritime adventure. It is the “magic hour” of sunset and the sailors congregate on the deck. It is liminal-time and liminal-space.
We will experience a very strange, very liminal-story.
This too “has been one of the dark places of the earth" he cryptically intones. England, he means. At the height of its empire and world dominance, “the empire on which the sun never sets." He layers his story about a trip into the heart of the African continent upon the earlier iterations of the periphery in which Britain was once the wild savage place, on the outskirts of the known world, colonized by the Romans.
This guy just sees differently. He sees patterns in time and in space. He is not normal.
He goes on to tell a story about a gig he once took on a freshwater steamer through a kind of Late Victorian NGO run out of Belgium. We might even call it a “faith-based initiative,” but what the actual faith is remains unspecified. It is pan-European Liberalism, with the mysterious Mr. Kurtz as the avatar.
Marlow’s commission is to captain a steamer as part of an operation into the heart of “the dark continent.” He thinks it’s for adventure, or at the very least a job. The company, though, has a dual mission: ivory and enlightenment. Men get on ships for purpose, the purpose to extend or protect. This primordial motivation is not new, save for the scale. Marlow notes that the Drake’s of an earlier era were
Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they had all gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of the sparks from the sacred fire.
Ivory was the gold of day, or diamonds, or whatever. It was big money. The cover story for the resource grab was that this was a development project, setting about to bring civilization to the savages, or as he puts it: the “weening of those ignorant millions of their horrid ways.”
As soon as Marlow arrives at the outer station it is abundantly clear that this is not a civilizing project but an extension of Dante’s vision of hell, a new circle in which the natives are being ground up as a necessary labor for the company’s profit. The mission is the cover for the profit motive, and Marlow is not a true believer. He attempts to be rather libertarian about his situation, but the events unfold in such a way that he cannot escape the truth. During his initial meeting with the company accountant (how perfect), he hears about the great man Mr. Kurtz, the brilliant, true believing “product of all of Europe.” Kurtz has arrived in Africa aflame with purpose, armed with big ideas and soaring goals. He does not change the continent, really, but the continent surely changes him. Or, as Marlow would have it, the continent awakened his own ‘inner savage.” Kurtz never returns to his glory in Europe. Instead Kurtz is unceremoniously buried in a mud hole. The great white-man-killer malaria gets him, but not before he becomes a kind of white-god.
Instead of being merely an entrepreneurial genius, a wunderkind that would be right at home in Silicon Valley, or on the cutting edge of Big Pharma, Marlow tells us Kurtz “went and got himself worshipped” by a tribe of locals, both his workers and worshippers. A kind of literal cult of personality. He becomes a god, and abstracts not only ivory but reverence.
Much has been said about Conrad’s critique of European, specifically Belgian, brutality and evil. All of it true. But what fascinates me is that he can also see through the cover story of Liberal hegemony. The Enlightenment is, as McGilchrist points out, a kind of zombie-Protestantism, an allegedly faithless faith, a leveling of wholes into parts for the purpose of reserves and exploitation. We have been taught that secularism “just is,” that liberalism “just is.” Somehow it alone stands for neutrality, with no content or beliefs or objectives. Kurtz is filled with dreams of “pity, science, and progress.” This secularist credo reeks of self-delusion, and the monstrous facts send the mind reeling.
Liberal hegemony cannot see itself. It is a religion without a specific creed, or an explicitly stated creed. This unstated creed is where its power lies. Or, it is a religion with a creed not explicitly stated, or even not admitted. Salvation comes through trade and markets and commerce. Grace in the liberal religion is efficiency, and proper systems and accounting. Profits and Prophets, but without all that Jesus mumbo-jumbo.
But Marlow sees it all laid bare: the disgusting and perverse incentives of maximum extraction over and against sensible cultivation. He bears witness. How can we be so blind? Why even bother with the cover story? The cover story is the lie we tell ourselves so that we can go about the grubby business. It’s the aftermath of post Jesus liberal Protestantism, a religion for the sophisticates, a kind of just-below-surface Hegelian movement bringing about the World Spirit, or the synthesis of state and spirit through markets.
Or as Billy Bragg put it elsewhere: “making the world safe for capitalism.”
And Conrad/Marlow can see it all so clearly because he is in there but not from there, an outsider who lives as a resident alien (regardless of actual status), an insider who is from the outside. All great poets must occupy these hemispheres, they must live in this in-between, which is what allows them to see in ways few of us can, in the tension. Poets are liminal seers.
Marlow shows us that there is always the stated mission and the de facto mission, the cover story and the real story. We in the West can’t see our own “real story” because we’ve come to believe in our own cover story. Getting high on your own supply and believing your own bull sh*t is a recipe for disaster. The collateral damage will be real.
Conrad affords us an insight that we can’t get without him—we can’t see “The Horror! The Horror!”—without Marlow’s powerful witness. And only he among the avaricious white men has eyes to see and ears to hear. We are religious—all of us—and we don’t know it.
But the insights are pushed further. The horror he sees is...HIM...what he has done, what he is capable of. With all the bougie restraints of modern life we are quick to lose sight of our own capacity for evil. We may leave religion, but religion never leaves us. A theodicy that goes mute over these fundamental questions of human psychology is not serious and is not adequate. Marlow marvels at Kurtz’ famous last lines, but not so much to condemn him, but to condemn all of us:
No eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it—I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
Do we know restraint? Do we possess faith? Do we possess fear? Kurtz’ sincerity and Marlow’s witness are cries for us to know ourselves, to understand our motives, to understand our whys. We are dangerous, both at the individual and collective levels because we operate from a space of self-delusion and self-orientation. Like all villains, we believe we are basically good. We believe that the rules apply to everyone else.
We need to find our restraint again, but in order to do so we must see, again. The great call for liberation has rendered us monsters or gods, not fully human, and we are unable to utter our own bursts of sincerity. What a horror indeed.